Basic Wiki Editing
A lot of you have been wondering how to easily create a simple yet effective wiki page. With hope, this guide will show you all you need to know, and I'll be dividing it into various sections for different pieces. How to Create a page The first thing you'll need to do to start off a page is create one, so that you have something to edit. This is easily the simplest part of the process, but it can still be a mild bit confusing at a certain step. #In the top right corner of the wiki page, you should see a button with a Page symbol that says 'Contribute'. Head all the way down to 'Add a page'. #A mini-window (shown right) will pop up asking you what you want to call your page. Simply write whatever you want the page title to be in that box, and beneath it you'll see two options - standard layout, or blank page. Go with blank page, it's easier to work with. #Voila! Your page has been created and you'll immediately be taken to the editing screen. Your Editing Tools Basic Tools For the most part, editing a wiki page works the same way a word processor would. At the top of the editing screen, you'll have the following options: *'Bold' *''Italic'' *Hyperlink *Bullet Points #Number List #*Increase Indentation *Decrease Indentation *Text Formatting *The three Text Alignment options (left, centred, right) *Undo and Redo You'll also have a button that says 'More+' on the far right. When you click that, you'll be shown more tools for you to use, which include: *Underline *Strikethrough *Signature (I'm honestly not sure what this button does, but when I click it a bunch of tildes appear like this 'TheBaffMan (talk) 15:35, November 8, 2014 (UTC)' so I assume clicking that button provides the wiki with an orgasm. Do this if you want to appreciate it's service, I guess?) *CORRECTION, it appears the it will intially appear as a bunch of tildes like this TheBaffMan (talk) 15:37, November 8, 2014 (UTC) before transforming into an actual signiature of something you did and when. Huh, the more you know. *CORRECTION #2 - putting 4 tildes in a row will make it happen regardless, the more you know. On the right side of the screen, you'll also notice that there are all kinds of options related to Features and Media, Categories and Templates - we won't be going into those now, instead they'll be part of the Advanced Guide. Source Mode and Visual Mode Just above the normal editing tools, you'll also see two 'tabs'. The one you should be on is called the 'Visual' tab which is a 'What you see is what you get' editor, the way it looks on the Visual tab is the way it should appear on the article - this is the main tab you'll use when editing. The other tab is labelled as the 'Source' tab. This allows you to really dig in deep and get into the actual code of your page. This option you really won't need to use much for anything except any Infoboxes you might want to attach to your page. I'll be covering how to use those in a different section - for now, you don't have to bother using the Source tab. Wiki-based Hyperlinks Hyperlinks are easy to use, but there's a small discrepancy with wiki hyperlinks compared to normal ones. When you open the hyperlink button, you'll have a field for the the target page or URL, a field for the text to be shown (which will be whatever text you've highlighted) and then the option of 'to a wiki page' or 'to an external link'. Starting with the last option, if you want to link to a page within this wiki, leave it on that, but if you want to link to a page outside this wiki you need to click external and give the full URL. Otherwise, you can just provide the title of the page you're trying to link to - be sure to get the title of the page right or you'll end up with a red link that goes no-where (the hyperlink window should tell you if a page exists or not). You can actually use this as another way to create pages. If you click a red link to a page that doesn't exist, the wiki will ask you if you want to create that page, to which you can say 'yes'. Text Formatting and the Contents box Formatting your text is the best way to organise sections of your wiki page. Whilst using bold, italics etc can be considered text formatting, this section solely focuses on the drop-down list tool you can find at the top of the editing window. The drop-down list contains a lot of header options, and it's these header options that allow for the creation of the little contents box you see at the top of most wiki pages - you can actually view how these work by looking at the following list and checking out how they look in the contents box for this page. The drop down list contains the following options: Normal Text Heading 2 Heading 3 Heading 4 Heading 5 code/preformatted I won't use much more than Heading 2 and Heading 3 to create a wiki artlcle, aside from the natural abundance of Normal text. Once you have a heading, just press enter and it will automatically switch back to Normal text beneath the heading. Usually, you'll want to use Heading 2 to cover large sections of your wiki (large titles such as Profile, Abilities etc) and use Heading 3 to provide sections within those sections (Profile -> Background, Personallity, or Abilities-> Magecraft, Martial Arts) and then use normal text within those to cover the nitty-gritty details. IMPORTANT: 'If you want some introductory text to appear before the contents box, make sure to only begin using Headers after you have made the introductory paragraph in normal text. The contents box only registers items that have been formatted as Headers. Publishing your page When you think you've finished your page, or perhaps simply whenever you want to save what you've done and take a break, you'll want to publish your edits. On the top-right portion of the entire window, you'll see a text box followed by two buttons - Preview and Publish. You can ignore the text box for the most part, though you're free to write in a summary of your edit if you want to keep track of the things you've done recently. *'Preview - This button, when clicked, will show you a preview of how your page will look when it's complete. It's a very useful tool if you want to quickly check how the finished product will be without going through the trouble of publishing and editing again. *'Publish '- This is what you'll use to publish your finished page so that it's visible publically, and is the best way to save what you've worked on so far. Don't be afraid to publish unfinished articles, it's better to be able to come back to them later than to lose it all for whatever reason. WARNING: If you leave the editing window open for a particularly long time, when you hit publish it may not actually publish what you've done, instead loading the editing window again - Don't worry, your edits should still be there, but you'll need to click Publish a second time to actually get it to work (the wiki should prompt you when this has occurred, as well). Conclusion That's all you need to create a very basic wiki article that's purely text based. In this article your main areas or learning will most likely be the proper use of Headers and how they relate to the contents box, as well as a little bit on how hyperlinks work. If you've got any questions about these areas, please let me know. Otherwise, you can now continue to the section on Advanced Wiki Editing Category:Resources